%420. The "Confederate States of America."%—The meaning of this act of secession was that South Carolina now claimed to be a "sovereign, free, and independent" nation. But she was not the only state to take this step. By February 1, 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had also left the Union. Three days later, February 4, 1861, delegates from six of these seven states met at Montgomery, Ala., formed a constitution, established a provisional government, which they called the "Confederate States of America," and elected Jefferson Davis and Alexander H. Stephens provisional President and Vice President.
Toward preventing or stopping this, Buchanan did nothing. No state, he said, had a right to secede. But a state having seceded, he had no power to make her come back, because he could not make war on a state; that is, he could not preserve the Union. On one matter, however, he was forced to act. When South Carolina seceded, the three forts in Charleston harbor—Castle Pinckney, Fort Sumter, and Fort Moultrie—were in charge of a major of artillery named Robert Anderson. He had under him some eighty officers and men, and knowing that he could not hold all three forts, and fearing that the South would seize Fort Sumter, he dismantled Fort Moultrie, spiked the cannon, cut down the flagstaff, and removed to Fort Sumter, on the evening of December 26, 1860.
[Illustration: CHARLESTON HARBOR]
This act was heartily approved by the people of the North and by Congress, and Buchanan with great reluctance yielded to their demand, and sent the Star of the West, with food and men, to relieve Anderson. But as the vessel, with our flag at its fore, was steaming up the channel toward Charleston harbor, the Southern batteries fired upon her, and she went back to New York. Anderson was thus left to his fate, and as Buchanan's term was nearly out, both sides waited to see what Lincoln would do.
%421. Why did the States secede?%—Why did the Southern slave states secede? To be fair to them we must seek the answer in the speeches of their leaders. "Your votes," said Jefferson Davis, "refuse to recognize our domestic institutions [slavery], which preexisted the formation of the Union, our property [slaves], which was guaranteed by the Constitution. You refuse us that equality without which we should be degraded if we remained in the Union. You elect a candidate upon the basis of sectional hostility; one who in his speeches, now thrown broadcast over the country, made a distinct declaration of war upon our institutions."
"There is," said Howell Cobb, of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, "no other remedy for the existing state of things except immediate secession."
"Our position," said the Mississippi secession convention, "is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery. A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union."
Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, asserted that the Personal Liberty laws of some of the free states "constitute the only cause, in my opinion, which can justify secession."
The South seceded, then, according to its own statements, because the people believed that the election of Lincoln meant the abolition of slavery.
%422. Compromise attempted%.—The Republican party in 1861 had no intention of abolishing slavery. Its purpose was to stop the spread of slavery into the territories, to stop the admission of more slave states, but not to abolish slavery in states where it already existed. A strong wish therefore existed in the North to compromise the sectional differences. Many plans for a compromise were offered, but only one, that of Crittenden, of Kentucky, need be mentioned. He proposed that the Constitution should be so amended as to provide